


explain the infinite

by notkellymarie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Divergent, Canon Rewrite, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Flashbacks, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), Memories, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-TRoS, Post-War, Rey POV, but subtle, if we absolutely have to insist that tros happened then this is how it ends for me, in this house we don't say the name rey palps, you decide if it happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:34:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22997761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notkellymarie/pseuds/notkellymarie
Summary: “Does she tell them? About him?Where would she even start?”--Rey contemplates how to tell her friends about Ben Solo's sacrifice.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 8
Kudos: 55





	explain the infinite

**Author's Note:**

> i took a four day break from twitter and churned out a short fic. please be aware that i have read none novelizations so there may be details that would be different from what's in the books. sorry. also unbeta'd. sorry.

Does she tell them? About him?

Where would she even start?

\--

The sounds of revelers come rushing back, flooding Rey’s ears. For a second, her muscles tense up as her brain interprets the noise and activity as a response to an assault, then she remembers. For the first time in a long time, the rebels don’t have to worry about enemy forces, and they are free to let loose, to drink as much wine and ale as they have in reserve, and to dance until the morning. 

They’ve won.

Rey looks away from the campfire she’s sitting around, her eyes focusing on nothing in particular as the merriment merges into a swirl of color and music that overwhelms her senses. An echo of Rose’s laughter at a joke Poe made reaches her ears, but she finds herself too hollow to pay attention.

\--

Should she start from the beginning, at their first encounter in the forest? Maybe not. She remembers being literally paralyzed from terror, then nothing but darkness until she woke up in that cold room. Poe can probably cover that one, since they are, as he’s previously declared, “torture buddies.”

After hearing him recount it, though, she knew they had two completely different experiences. So maybe she should start there, when Kylo Ren took off his helmet and bared his face to her. How she expected a grotesque figure instead of the princely countenance she saw, his voice low and quiet even as he forcefully rifled through her memories and peered through her deepest thoughts. Or maybe at the part where she surprised both him and herself by doing something she didn’t know she was capable of, flinging open a door in his mind and revealing his greatest fear.

Through her anger she thought him to be weak at the time, attributing her success at seeing into his mind to his insecurities poking holes through his shields, but in her innermost self she felt an awakening. A brilliant beam of light illuminating a corner in her subconscious she’s never dared venture into before, then in him she becomes aware of it: recognition—a sense of equal strength and familiarity—although she would have never admitted to it, for what would she have in common with a monster in a mask?

A monster who stalked her in the snow, who struck down her friend, who… offered to teach her the ways of the Force. The monster who, after unwittingly opening the door to her, gave a name to the unspoken energy she felt coursing through her veins.

Oh, the look on his face when the Skywalker lightsaber answered her call… she doesn’t think she’ll ever forget it. She expected indignation and outrage, but instead it had been disbelief, and in the purple light of their interlocked lightsabers there was something else in his eyes that she couldn’t read. Only after she had slashed his face in rage did she realize: it was awe and wonder. No one had ever given her that look before, but there she was in the cracking earth with her enemy, a man mesmerized by her strength and her power even after she’d marked him with rent flesh and blood.

Does she tell them about the first time they saw each other through the Force? 

Maker, she hadn’t even mentioned the fact that they could do that. 

Maybe she could describe the sound of the bullet from her blaster pinging off the rock huts in Ahch-To, or the almost childlike curiosity in his voice as he tried to figure out the impossibility of their situation. _“Just you.”_ He seemed so solid, like she could reach out and feel the material of his clothes or the jagged ridges of the scar she gave him. She was angry at him, loathed him for what he did to Han, but her traitorous fingers itched to touch him. She didn’t.

Or does she talk about the second time she called him a monster, in the rain? How readily he acknowledged it. “ _Yes, I am,”_ he’d said, his eyes intense and unblinking, but in the back of her head was a small voice that wondered if he was trying to convince himself as much he was trying to convince her. It’s not that she doubted it anyway, at the time. _Murderous snake_ , she had spat out, and he didn’t even flinch. Knowing what she does now, she wishes she could take it back.

Should she mention that time she saw him half-naked? How broad his chest was or how his old scars and moles were scattered like constellations all over his chiseled torso was not relevant, but she found out about how his uncle had nearly killed him that night. That was important. She was certain he was lying, because there was no way _the_ Luke Skywalker could ever do such a thing to his nephew. But at the moment she couldn’t have explained the pang of pity she’d felt for him or the sudden image she’d seen of the frightened face of a boy in the glow of a weapon held over his head, not to anyone who would’ve asked.

In the rain she told him that she already knew everything there was to know about him, but she couldn’t even begin to imagine how wrong she was.

Maybe omit the lack of a cowl?

Does she tell them about that night by the fire? A blanket draped around her body as she shivered from the cold or maybe it’s from the deep rumble of his voice, soft and comforting, she wasn’t really sure. She thinks Poe would laugh at this. Kylo Ren, Jedi-killer, being gentle. But at that time there was no one else she wanted to speak to, no one else she wanted to be around except for him, and he grounded her with his steadfast presence. 

_“You’re not alone.”_

She believed him—even though they were enemies, even though the things that they stood and fought for are at odds, she believed him. In the Resistance she found valuable friendships, but with Kylo she found a kindred spirit. He’d seen her fury, her loneliness, and her sorrow—the parts of her that she kept hidden for so long—and he listened without judgment. He had seen her, and he understood, just as she understood his pain the way no one else had. 

How could she ever describe the featherlight touch of his fingers and how it set her nerves alight? What words could accurately convey the sense of _home_ that she felt seeing the vision of them standing together? 

It was just the shape of it, but the promise of a shared future burned in her chest and consumed her being, enough for her to go to him and face his master herself. _How strange_ , she thought then, _to go from dreaming of rebuilding the past to chasing the hereafter._ In the turbolift he denied her and spoke of seeing her turn, but his gaze was serene and almost tender as he let her call him by his true name. _Ben._ She relished the way it rolled off her tongue. _Ben._

Sitting on a log in Ajan Kloss, her heart pounds, as it did at the moment Snoke ordered Ben to kill her in that red throne room. But even through her throbbing headache from Snoke’s probe, she knew then, didn’t she, that he wouldn’t? Trust, pride, and hope—all the emotions that she had felt and projected to him, looking into his bright eyes as her knees spasmed from where she knelt on the hard floor.

Trust that he would do the right thing.

Pride, as his grandfather’s lightsaber finally responded to his beckon.

Hope, as the Supreme Leader’s bisected corpse thuds onto the polished floor.

No more masters. 

She couldn’t narrate the ensuing battle, even if she thought hard enough. Through the rush of adrenaline, everything was a blur of blue and red plasma hitting steel, red armor against black and gray, grunts of effort and screams of pain as one by one the guards went down. Maybe she could describe in detail how rigid Ben’s muscles were pressed against hers as they stood back to back, instead, or the heft of his thigh as she braced herself to kick; the ferocity of his blows, with his teeth bared and nostrils flared, and her own heartbeat a drum in her ears.

Her eyes sting with tears as she recalls how her heart ached when he offered his hand a second time, and she realized she couldn’t take it. He had prodded her to confront truths about herself that she had long buried, unearthed bitterness that her psyche sought to protect her once-young mind from, but although it hurt she still wanted to be with him so badly. Torn between this intense yearning and her strong conviction to do the right thing, to keep her friends in the rebellion safe. The throne room was wrecked: a rain of ember and a world of fire reflecting the storm of feelings in her heart. Inferno. 

_“Please don’t go this way.”_

_You’re going down a path I can’t follow._

How is she supposed to describe the anguish painted on his face when he realized that she’d chosen and it’s not him? 

If she had known then that he would—

She should’ve taken his hand. 

_No_. 

She knows she made the right decision. 

It was worth it to see her friends again, to see the Resistance survive to fight another day. But to say that it hurt any less would be an untruth. It wasn’t easy to run away from him for a year, to act like it didn’t make her miserable to ignore the once-blazing vision, to bury herself into her work and her lessons until the longing petered out to a dull ache she was able to put in a small box and tuck away in her heart. 

When she was agitated, they’d push each other, taunting, plucking at their sore spots until they ended up trading blows. It was almost funny, if it wasn’t so frustrating, how the fact that they know each other so intimately meant that they could also be extraordinarily brutal to one another. But at her most vulnerable, she’d let him sit quietly a few feet from her in the same room until the bond closed, and she’d have to deny feeling bereft, watching the space that he had occupied just then.

She’d seen it, the worried glances. It was hard to keep it from Finn, both because of the fact that he seemed like he knew more than he was letting on, and because he was her best friend and she longed to talk to him about it. But would he understand? She thought Rose would, eventually, but after a while it seemed easier to pretend that she was just meditating, or talking to herself. If Leia knew, she didn’t say a word about it, but Rey got the feeling that she wanted to ask. Maybe it was cruel not to say anything, but Rey thought it might have been more cruel to keep giving her hope only to end up disappointing her in the end.

They couldn’t seem to stop fighting, and she was bone-tired. He’d chase after her, she’d run away, and they’d engage in a skirmish if it came down to it, the precious connection they had stretched thin by animosity and constant denial of their mutual desire to be together. 

She was weary, but she was also filled to the brim with anger, and she wanted to stop running. 

Finn could probably tell the others about the ruins of the Death Star, how the wind howled and the waves thrashed as their sabers met, over and over and over, to the point of exhaustion. He couldn’t have known, though, how Kylo Ren hesitated to strike her. Couldn’t have seen through the furious and towering spray of saltwater how her rage overtook her as she caught his weapon and plunged it right into his chest, his flesh yielding at the same moment they felt Leia breathe her last.

With horror and immediate regret, she watched him slowly slide to the wet floor, his bewildered expression like a child who has lost track of their mother in a crowded place. Dazed and unspeaking, he merely stared at her while she poured light into his wound, but something stirred in the hazel depth of his eyes as her resolve broke down in her weariness and she confessed that she wanted to take his hand back at the Supremacy.

There was no way Finn would have known all this, so she would have to tell them.

And then she’ll have to recount how even as she stood in front of the greatest evil in the galaxy she felt peace because she knew Ben was there. Without a wayfinder or a lightsaber, only a blaster in hand, he found his way back to her. That through the Force, the Skywalker lightsaber once again responded to his call, and that he readily cut down his own subordinates just to get to her side. 

The Emperor was stronger than they were prepared for, and with them pushed to their limit and their special bond sullied, the following events became a haze of lightning and blue light and shadow, the sounds of cultists chanting and the distant boom of explosions and the whispers of unfamiliar but powerful voices mingling in the fog. Then a blinding ray of white, then it was done.

She felt a flutter of panic bloom in her chest because Ben is nowhere to be found, but Palpatine was gone and she was so exhausted, so tired, so depleted—and she was ready. In that dark void, she was ready. To die, to be one with the Force, like the rest of the Jedi before her. Her friends were safe, she’d done what she set out to do, and Ben—

That was it, wasn’t it? 

Ben. 

She remembers feeling a tug, a great effort to haul her right back into the realm of the Living, and it was Ben whose bruised and cut face she saw gazing at her with hope right when she opened her eyes, whose broken limbs were holding her up.

Does she tell them about the weight of his hand on her stomach, or the rough surface of his knuckles as she puts her hand on his? Her nerve endings tingle with the memory of the smoothness of his jaw as she cupped his cheek, the soft of his lips as she claimed it—finally, finally—and the warmth of his arms wrapping around her tightly like it was a dream he was not willing to wake up from.

And what about his smile? There was that gentle one that greeted her when she woke up, his eyes glittering with tears. Or the one that’s seared into her soul, the dazzling grin he gave her after they kissed. He let out a soft chuckle then, the corner of his eyes crinkling and his teeth showing. She’d been struck by the fact that they were a little crooked--how had she never noticed? She can still feel the deep grooves of his dimples underneath her fingertips, still hear the gruff sound of his mirth in her mind. How long had it been since the last time he truly laughed?

He was radiant and he was beautiful as she’d never seen, and her spirit sang and rejoiced. Maz told her once that the belonging she seeked was ahead of her, and at that moment, she finally figured it out.

_There you are. It was you I’ve been waiting for all along._

What happens after the war she didn’t know, but she knew they’ll figure it out together. She was sure it will be difficult, and not everyone will accept it right away, or maybe not ever, but the important thing was that they truly will never be alone again.

\--

Does she tell them about how his body fell? All color drained from his face, his lips gray as he laid motionless on the cold ground of Exegol, fading away into nothing seconds after they looked into each other’s eyes with full acknowledgment of their love and devotion, as if he never existed at all.

And all she had left are his clothes and a hole in her heart that thrums with grief and despair even now as she tries to join the celebration of the Resistance’s victory over the Sith and the First Order, realizing that none of these people would ever know how Ben Solo—the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo and nephew to Luke Skywalker; the former Supreme Leader and most feared man in the galaxy; the man she loves; the other half of her soul—held her and gave his life for her. 

In her mind, an echo: _“No one’s ever really gone.”_

\--

She stands up abruptly, drawing the attention of her friends. 

“Rey, what’s wrong?” Rose asks. Poe is a little tipsy, but is aware enough to look visibly confused, while Finn gazes at her with concern on his face.

There was a time when she decided that she would wait for the future to unfold as the Force willed. Now that she’s seen that future, she’s rejecting it. 

Finn gently grabs her wrist, “Are you sure about this?”

Nodding, she turns to the rest of her friends. “I wouldn’t be here if Ben—Kylo—didn’t sacrifice his life for mine,” Poe’s jaw drops at this, “and I’m dragging his ass back here so he can tell the story himself.”

Finn squeezes her hand supportively and lets go, as Rose and Poe sit in stunned silence. She gives them a final determined smile, and she starts heading back to her tent to pack up her things. A glow catches her eye, and without stopping, she turns her head to see two blue-hued specters sitting on a log a few feet from the festivities—Leia beaming brightly at her while Luke yells, “Go get him, kid!” 

The time for waiting is over.

_Wait for me, Ben. I’m coming._

\--

Somewhere, in a hidden pocket of time and space, Ben Solo opens his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic almost had a sentence with an F-bomb in it, but i chickened out
> 
> title is from saturn by sleeping at last, which makes me cry every time


End file.
